It's relatively rare to see every single analyst miss when forecasting a company's earnings. When that happens, you know the news is either very good -- or very bad.

I. A Pleasant Sort of Surprise

Fortunately for Qualcomm, Inc. (QCOM), it falls under the former category. On Tuesday it announced its fiscal Q4 2012 results [PDF]. The San Diego, Calif.-based smartphone chipmaker revealed that in the quarter ending in September it made $4.87B USD in revenue and $1.27B USD in net income (profit).

Analysts had predicted a solid, but sleepier $4.66B USD revenue haul, with the actual results approaching the high end of 37 estimates collected by the UK financial analysis agency The Financial Times.

But the big surprise was the profit. Analysts had expected only $1.16B USD in profit. Even the most optimistic analyst only predicted $1.24B USD in profit ($0.87 USD/share). In other words Qualcomm blew away all the predictions regarding profit, and smoked the average expectation by 9 percent.

Qualcomm, which offers a quarterly dividend to shareholders, has also been repurchasing stock to further share its profits with investors. The company is currently sitting on $26.8B USD in cash, meaning that it has a lot of money for acquisitions, should it choose to make a move.

Compared to some other ARM-architecture chipmakers like NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA), Qualcomm's Q1 2013 outlook is relatively optimistic. Despite a slowing semiconductor and device market, the Californian company hopes to sustain double-digit growth in many metrics over the holiday. The only expected dip is in diluted shares, as Qualcomm moves to shutter its discontinued Flo TV business.